Phoneless

14th October 2017

I’ve always loved my Apple Watch. When Apple announced LTE in the Series 3 I was initially disappointed that they hadn’t given us always on screens, but also shocked that they’d managed to get energy efficient LTE into the device at all without killing the battery in 5 seconds flat. Truly impressive. Without going into the details of how I’ve routed what to where (it’s convoluted trust me) I’ve upgraded from my 42mm Silver Stainless Steel Series 2 to the equivalent Series 3 model earlier this week, and also linked it to an iPhone.

My goal: ditch my phone when outside the house and use the watch for as much as possible.

An Apple Watch paired with AirPods (or even a single AirPod) is already lighter and more convenient than a phone for phone calls since it’s more discrete and less intrusive. I’ve made phone calls both on AirPods and the speaker and they’re both passable though the AirPods are better, you could live without AirPods in a pinch. In which case, you’ve got a fully waterproof phone on your wrist that you can’t lose, is harder to break/scratch/damage, and with the sound off is totally silent when notifications come through your wrist.

I thought at length over the past month since the announcement about what I use my phone for, exactly. It’s a longer list than I initially thought, but I use my iPhone for:

Taking photos (less these days since I bought a DSLR)

To Do Lists (Things 2 was my favourite)

EMail (Outlook for work, Spark for TEN, Apple Mail for Personal)

Music (Apple Music)

Find My Friends

iMessage

Navigation (Sygic/Apple Maps)

Passwords (1Password)

Stocard (Wallet reduction)

Apple Pay

Social media (Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon)

Autosleep (Sleep Tracking)

Checking the Weather (BeWeather, Rain Parrot, Weather AU)

Calendar Appointments (Calendar/Fantastical/Outlook)

Playing Podcasts (Overcast)

Notetaking (Notes)

Surfing the Web (Safari)

Making/Receiving Phone calls

Checking Bank Balances

Calculator

Light

That’s it. Not a trivial amount, for sure.

Of the above, I can do all of those items now, using the Apple Watch on LTE with no phone nearby, except:

Checking Bank Balances (rare thing but could get annoying)

Social Media (have stopped using it anyway)

Outlook for work (I still get the notifications though, so that’s fine and my work calendar is mapped to Calendar for Fantastical anyway)

Spark Mail (Will migrate to Mail)

Things (migrated already to Reminders)

Playing Podcasts (Reluctantly moving to WatchPlayer, but it works okay)

With time, developers will update their apps to use direct data interaction with servers rather than via the paired iPhone so that list should get shorter in due course.

The main idea here is that at work I’ve gone full iPad Pro anyway, and I’ll have that with me on work days and at home. When I’m out on personal errands I won’t have it, but under those circumstances, the ONLY thing that I’ll miss is web searching, and Siri can help with a small number of those searches, but that’s really the only big hole.

There are other niggly-holes though like having to abandon Overcast for podcast playback, but I know its developer (Marco Arment) is working hard on a solution as we speak (so to speak). Preparing to listen to podcasts now must be done ahead of time, preloaded, and transfer them to the Watch over WiFi (not Bluetooth) unless you’re a masochist and it works okay. (Podcast spontaneity will be on hold for now)

I had to add each song in Apple Music to a monster playlist to force it all onto my Watch but that works fine now and the 16Gb of storage is enough for the vast majority of my music collection I’d want to listen to regularly. It’s easy to add songs via my iPad and it will sync up when I get home plus WatchOS 4.1 will bring streaming to the Watch which will be very nice as well.

I realise that Apple isn’t trying to make the smartphone obsolete, and I and many others are going to use the watch as a standalone device when that’s not really its intent. But really, if it’s going to work for practically everything I need, I’ll leave my iPhone at home, plugged in and just use my Watch for everything else. In time the Watch won’t be tethered to a phone anymore, and apps will all communicate directly to servers rather than via a proxy system. At which point I probably won’t bother with a phone, but that’s probably a few more years away - and that’s okay.

I’m not the first nor will I be the last person to try this, but this is going to be a fun experiment. Let’s see how it turns out…